Thread: Mr Site Takeaway website software beginner

WEB WONDER

Every business absolutely needs to have a website. But if hiring a web designer is a little too much for your budget, we bring you the Mr Site Takeaway website, a service that creates and maintains your online world.

Features

The key features of Mr Site are the personalized dot com addresses, Secure PayPal shopping cart, support for up to 20 e-mail addresses, 150MB host space, photo gallery, Guest book, phone and email support, and blog account. As a plus for Indian users, 'co. in' website addresses are available too.

Starting off with Mr Site is easy, as it comes with a very handy instruction manual. Just head over to the activation page and input your code. After the activation process, head over to the Web page and get started.

The first step in creating a website is to choose a design, which has over a hundred styles to choose from. Then, it is time to personalize it by tweaking background colors and patterns, menu styles and themes. As you play with the controls, whatever you pick is reflected in a preview pane on the Web page, so that it acts like a editor.

Then, set the number of pages, and the title of the main page. It is important to note that if you reduce the number of pages in the future, you will actually be deleting all the content on them.

The Simple mode in the Content Editor has three main test input fields from Title, description and main text, along with a couple of buttons for inserting images and downloads. The Creative mode is for advanced users and where the text fields are converted to mini-HTML editor frames; the user can switch between three views-Normal, HTML and Preview. After all this is done, click the 'Publish your site' link. Depending on how large the contents of the Web pages are, it will take time to create and publish.



Extras contain some great tools, for instance, forums and user created widgets that can be incorporated into the website, such as a poll and mailing list tool.

Performance

We ran all the sample websites created by Mr Site through the markup validation service, and all of them threw up many errors, which however, don't take away from the experience of surfing these websites. All the designs are neat, with few distractions that is a rookie mistake for most entrepreneurs who create websites for their businesses for the first time. Plus, all generated pages have metadata which includes Mr Site copyright information. But when we took a look at the source code, everything was clear and understandable. This is handy if you plan to examine the code later and make some changes.

The only drawback to Mr Site was that the online store created works only if you have a PayPal account. So, if you don't have one, you first need to create a PayPal address, before creating the shop.

VERDICT

If you need a professional look for your business website, this is for you.

FOR

Great features, easy to use interface.

AGAINST

Requires PayPal to create shopping cart.